A wide variety of different types of processors are known. By way of example, a processor may comprise an electronic circuit that carries out instructions of a program to perform basic arithmetic, logical and input/output operations of a digital system. Digital systems typically require a large number of arithmetic operations to be performed rapidly and repetitively. General purpose processors as well as specific processors and co-processors are found in a large number of digital systems, and these processors may include, again by way of example, central processing units, graphics processing units, digital signal processing units and network processors.
Processors can be particularly useful and flexible, but they typically include a program-oriented general purpose structure that limits the overall speed of the computations. Utilization of certain hardware elements is often low, and such elements may be difficult or even impossible to reuse for other purposes.
As an example, digital systems comprising Galois field (GF) arithmetic hardware or other types of hardware for performing computations over a finite field are utilized in a wide variety of applications, including, by way of example, certain forward error correction (FEC) and cryptography.
As a more particular example, optical networks that include communication links having data rates of 10 Gbps or higher often incorporate FEC functionality using Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. The RS decoders utilized in such arrangements typically comprise GF-based arithmetic hardware, in particular GF-based multipliers and GF-based adders. However, the utilization of such multipliers is often low and poorly correlated with the decoder throughput. Nonetheless, as data rates continue to increase, the throughput of the decoder must be increased accordingly, requiring the deployment of expensive hardware having excessively large circuit area and high power consumption.
Similar problems arise in other applications involving the use of GF-based arithmetic hardware, as well as in applications involving other types of processing hardware for performing computations over a finite field. For example, cryptographic processors used to perform operations such as encryption and decryption in a communication system can also suffer from the above-noted circuit area and power consumption drawbacks.
It is therefore apparent that a need exists for improved processor configurations that can alleviate the drawbacks of large circuit area and high power consumption that often arise in conventional processing hardware.